


Kiss a guilty world in love

by gloss



Category: The Big Bang Theory
Genre: Gen, Older Characters, Transfic Mini Fest, mtf
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-04-28
Updated: 2010-04-28
Packaged: 2017-10-10 18:21:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 351
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/102694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gloss/pseuds/gloss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sheldon and his Meemaw.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kiss a guilty world in love

Right from the start, Sheldon was a strange child. Eerie, some said, or "off", or just plain wrong. Touched, maybe, even retarded.

Lee saw a baby with watchful eyes, hunched slightly away from his rambunctious sister, and knew there was much more going on under the surface than anyone suspected.

Sheldon spoke at nine months and read at nineteen. He didn't like to be touched, but relaxed in Lee's lap, even consented to hair-petting.

All the other grandkids called Lee "Grampa". To be sure, that was partially true. On the outside, she looked like the old man who'd worked the shrimp boats in Galveston Bay for forty-odd years: Tobacco-brown skin, thin silver hair, big rough hands.

But when Sheldon said "Meemaw", Lee went whole. She responded with a fullness of soul she had previously only heard about in hymns. Sheldon smiled back, that sly smirk that drove his mother round the bend, and Lee nodded.

He gave her pale-green plastic clip-on earrings, then a blue scarf, next a sample size bottle of Jean Nate bath splash.

"Don't waste your allowance on me," she told him each time.

Sheldon would shake his head, grow even more mulish than usual. "It's just money. And it makes you happy."

She let her hair grow out, took to wearing loose shifts over her Wranglers and Indian rings, silver and turquoise, on her big fingers. Sheldon, who never noticed anything beyond his books and experiments, squinted up at her, told her she looked quite nice.

At eleven, he offered to give up physics and study medicine, urology specifically. "It shouldn't take long, figuring out how to fix you."

She didn't know how to tell him she didn't need fixing. He'd already done it. "You stick with your quarks and isotopes," she said instead and used her big voice.

Sheldon blanched, gulped, and acceded.

She did what she could to shield Sheldon from the nastier parts of life, but for all she did, she knows he did more for her than he could ever know.

As Sheldon's ego is bigger than Texas, that was really saying something.


End file.
